The continuum and incompatible realities

The continuum and incompatible realities names a central idea in Otto Cone’s account of the world: apparent unity can conceal elements so opposed that their encounter produces not harmony but collision. The novel gives this idea a concrete image in Alleluia Cone’s vision of an impossible city of ice on Everest, and later brings it into intimate focus through the unstable relationship between Alleluia and Gibreel Farishta.

Otto Cone’s warning

When Alleluia was fourteen, during the final year of Otto Cone’s life, her father described the continuum as one of the most dangerous lies people are taught: the belief that the world consists only of reconcilable elements and ultimately adds up to a homogeneous whole. A Polish émigré and survivor of a wartime prison camp, Otto insisted that incompatible histories and conditions coexist rather than resolve into a single order. “The world is incompatible, just never forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can’t ask for a wilder place.” His examples make contradiction geographical as well as historical: bliss and inferno may occupy neighboring places, without either cancelling the other.

The ice city on Everest

The concept returns during Alleluia’s descent from Everest. At twenty-seven thousand feet, she sees west of Camp Six, across the Rock Band and below the massif of Cho Oyu, a city made of enormous, thin, sharp ice needles glittering in sunlight. For an instant she thinks of Shangri-La, but the apparition offers no green valley of immortality: it is a metropolis of cold ice. When Pemba warns her to concentrate and she looks back, the city has disappeared. The vision does not settle into an ordinary landscape or a stable revelation. Its brief appearance makes the mountain a place where realities that should not coexist touch, then vanish from view.

That moment carries Alleluia back across time to Otto’s study in Bayswater, with its dark wooden furniture and heavy velvet curtains. The remembered lesson gives the apparition a framework without explaining it away: an impossible city is precisely the sort of presence that a supposedly seamless account of reality would exclude. Otto’s warning does not make the vision less strange; it makes strangeness evidence against the assumption that the world must be consistent.

The modern city as collision

Otto also applied his idea to city life. He called the modern city the classic location of incompatible realities: separate universes pass beside one another on an omnibus, a zebra crossing, a Tube station, or a hotel corridor, briefly sharing space without truly meeting. The danger begins when those worlds collide. “But if they meet! It’s uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom.” The image turns coexistence into a volatile condition: proximity may be uneventful, but contact can expose a conflict that no common surface has reconciled.

Otto’s own life supplies an uncomfortable personal counterpoint to his insistence on incompatible worlds. He rejected communism with such intensity that, at Christmas, he would celebrate with his Jewish family what he called an English rite in respect for their host nation, then burst into the room dressed in pantomime Chinese costume and announce, “Father Christmas is dead! I have killed him! I am The Mao: no presents for anyone! Hee! Hee! Hee!” Alicja Cohen remembered the performance as an example of his frequently appalling behavior, even while later recalling him as a good man. The episode holds together impulses that do not neatly agree: immigrant respect for a host culture, Jewish family celebration, political hatred, and theatrical provocation.

Intimacy and incompatible worlds

The idea also frames the novel’s account of Alleluia and Gibreel Farishta. Their passion is explicitly presented as unlike an ordinary relationship: after three weeks of ecstatic lovemaking, Alleluia abruptly tells Gibreel that he must find somewhere else to live because she needs more room. Her fear of the love she desires makes her retreat from, and even strike at, the person whose devotion she seeks; the greater the intimacy, the harder the blow. Gibreel’s own incompatibility with the relationship appears in his possessiveness and jealousy, which he had not recognized in himself before thinking of a woman as someone to be guarded against rivals.

Otto’s theory thus moves from mountains and cities into the private space of love. The relationship brings together powerful but conflicting needs, and closeness does not automatically reconcile them: it can make the collision more destructive. The narrative’s repeated contrast between side-by-side realities and worlds that meet gives the concept its force. Incompatibility is not merely difference; it is the unresolved pressure of difference when lives enter one another’s space.